Answering "why do you want to relocate?" during interviews

19 pointsposted 7 hours ago
by andrewstetsenko
(relocateme.substack.com)

37 Comments

ElevenLathe

7 hours ago

The advice can be generalized even more. When communicating with an employer or potential employer:

-> Subordinate yourself to the desires of capital in all areas.

-> Suppress the self.

-> Become a true human resource. You are seeking to sell a large chunk of your life, and the buyers don't want scratched or dented goods. Desires of your own are flaws in the product you are selling.

This is, sadly, sound advice, but I think it's important to reflect on what this means about how incidental human flourishing is in our current political economy.

Aurornis

6 hours ago

I’ve done a number of interviews in my career. You don’t have to be a genius to see through the candidates who play this game where they tell you a perfectly sanitized, idyllic response that they’ve calculated as the optimal phrasing that you want to hear.

A lot of applicants do it. The skill of interviewing is to get a sense of what the true situation is underneath what the candidate is saying with their words. These candidates who show up and do the “subordinate yourself to the desires of capital in all areas” schtick are plentiful. It doesn’t fool an experienced interviewer, so they’re going to be evaluating whether or not you can do the job without becoming a problem based on whatever other signals they can get. The candidate’s words are almost a no-op, other than a slight signal that they have a tendency to blow smoke instead of having real conversations.

harshalizee

5 hours ago

Then you shouldn't be asking those questions in the first place.

Why do you want a job?, Why do you want to relocate?, Why do you want to work here?, etc. are BS "no-op" questions that are not relevant to the skills that they are promoting.

If an interviewer asks these types of questions, they are literally showcasing that this part of the interview is a BS "Subordinate yourself to the desires of capital in all areas" conversation. You will predictably get the "no-op" answers you asked for.

The interviewer always sets the tone of the meeting. You can't complain when they chose to play along. If you want a real conversation, you need to make it amply clear.

user

44 minutes ago

[deleted]

Aurornis

29 minutes ago

> Then you shouldn't be asking those questions in the first place.

> Why do you want a job?, Why do you want to relocate?, Why do you want to work here?,

I never said anything about those questions or even the type of questions. Did you confuse my comment for someone else's?

The no-op answers I was talking about can come from any question, including technical ones. Some candidates will tell talk in circles for 30 minutes about the company's product and how the team did amazing things, but you can't pin them down to explaining what they did or anything that might prove they know what they're talking about.

They will change the subject at every opportunity and talk your ear off with things regurgitated from blogs, but you leave the interview feeling like you wasted 30 minutes because they were so busy dodging every question and combining words together that they thought you would like to hear.

One alternative is to skip the conversational format and go straight into coding and deep technical questions, but hey guess what? There are people who will hate you for doing that too!

BrandoElFollito

4 hours ago

"Why do you want to work here" can be insightful.

I like to be asked this because I can for one tell the truth, and then see how the interviewer responds (when this is at an advanced stage of the process, with real people)

threatofrain

6 hours ago

A no-op is exactly what the candidate wants. The candidate wants to be judged on their skills which are transferable from job to job. There's nothing to "see through" here which is precisely why it's a no-op.

Aurornis

6 hours ago

> A no-op is exactly what the candidate wants. The candidate wants to be judged on their skills which are transferable from job to job.

The interview is to determine their skills.

Some candidates will talk about their work history for 30 minutes and you leave the room with no real idea what they did. They tell you they created synergies and did cross-functional coordination with stakeholders in a metrics-driven blah blah blah. You receive no usable information about what they did, what they can do, or how much of the thing they talked about was due to their work. All you know is that they can talk a lot.

If they're applying to a dysfunctional vibes-based workplace then delivering an empty vibes-based interview can work. Smart people actively try to filter themselves out of those companies, not into them.

threatofrain

an hour ago

There are questions where it's time to shine with your skills and experience and then there are questions that are kind of snore because they invite everyone to give perfect answers.

Why do you want to relocate is one of them.

bluGill

6 hours ago

I suspect a lot of interviewers think it is a good thing when someone repeats those lines. That is they are not trying to get under the words.

user

6 hours ago

[deleted]

ElevenLathe

6 hours ago

Right, it's game of pretending that you sincerely desire these things. They don't want a faker, they want a true believer, and they have plenty of skillful people like you to use as tools to suss out who is and who isn't. To stick with the merchandise analogy, you must (sometimes) become like the "outlet" stores who fill their inventory with junk designed to be sold cheaply rather than marked down high end stuff. This flatters your customer into thinking they got a good deal, and is an effective way to make sales. This is an endless game of cat and mouse.

Aurornis

6 hours ago

> They don't want a faker, they want a true believer

I'm trying to explain that it's easy to spot the fakers.

When you do a lot of interviews you see a lot of candidates who follow the advice above. Unless it's your first month of doing interviews, it's really easy to see right through.

The candidates never think they're coming off as fake, though.

Really skilled interviewers can bait these candidates into telling little half-truths and inconsistencies that reveal their game.

ElevenLathe

6 hours ago

You're explaining that you think you do a good job of spotting the fakers. How would you know if you weren't? And anyway, the fakers (approximately everyone) don't have a choice but to be fakers, since the truth (I want this job because I want the money and visa it will confer) is disqualifying. Because no one is motivated primarily on the opportunity to work on adtech (to pick a popular example), one must choose one of:

1) Be truthful, and say the main reason you want the job is the money and the visa. You will be looked over as not having enough passion for the work.

2) Lie completely and say your number one motivation is adtech, something you would prostrate yourself to do in slum conditions if necessary. You will be sussed out as a faker.

3) Come up with some mixture of the two that the company can believe. If you can fool them into thinking you are at least somewhat motivated by the chance to work on their awful product, but also that there is truthfully some other motivation, you come across as a good bet and might not be thrown out of the pipeline.

surgical_fire

6 hours ago

> I’ve done a number of interviews in my career. You don’t have to be a genius to see through the candidates who play this game where they tell you a perfectly sanitized, idyllic response that they’ve calculated as the optimal phrasing that you want to hear.

I worked in multiple companies in my multi-decade career, including FAANG (or whatever acronym is used now). I was even an intervewer for one of those

The people that give the sanitized calculated responses are actually what employers are typically looking for. It shows the candidate is willing to do the job without causing problems by confirming as a good worker bee.

Your workplace is not somewhere for real conversations.

keiferski

6 hours ago

I don’t think the post says this at all. It’s mostly just common sense, like “don’t tell the interviewer you just want the job for the money and the ability to live abroad.” Instead be interested in whatever the company is doing.

This seems pretty straightforward, but I guess people like OP are exposed to a lot of bad interviewees by nature of their job.

luisminv

6 hours ago

Well I guess this is an overstatement for the sake of explaining your point and as such it's very effective, but I don't agree with this perspective. The advice tells you to remember that the person hiring you has also put work into that conversation, and that they'll appreciate realizing you have put work into it too. So i think there's an instance of letting our humanity flourish in this, since you're doing an exercise in empathy. There might be too few of these opportunties/spaces left tbh

Aurornis

6 hours ago

This is very good, practical advice. I would go even further and say that you shouldn’t even allow yourself to get into a position where you need to manipulate your answers to interviewers for this question. If the primary reason you want a job is for the relocation, you might be signing up for a job you don’t even like!

I’ve been part of a small number of hiring decisions where relocation was involved. There were a lot of failures exactly like this article talks about: Candidates who will say anything in the interview and even signal that they’ll accept any average salary as long as you’ll take care of their relocation were, in my experience, not interested in doing the work after they got here. Taking the job was a means to an end (getting to their destination) and once they arrived they were either looking for the next job or too busy traveling around their new location to do work.

We tried to mitigate this with clauses requiring them to pay back relocation expenses if they left within N months of arrival, but this didn’t work. They would resign the week after that timer expired or, worse, would start trying to get laid off through poor performance as a way to avoid that clause.

The best fits for relocation were opposite of what I would have thought: The people most hesitant to relocate were the most successful, both at the job and in establishing their new social life outside of work in the new location. They were relocating and taking jobs for the right reasons.

jemmyw

40 minutes ago

Every job is the means to an end really. But if people are taking jobs at your employer and then feel unmotivated and are trying to get a new job elsewhere as soon as they can, doesn't that point to your employment situation being part of the problem? If it's so easy to get a job elsewhere for more favourable work and/or salary then are you just underpaying the market?

soco

5 hours ago

What are for you the right reasons for taking a job? Most teams will have enough common sense and healthy relationships to offer something workable, also most software products are a piece of whatever - be it insurance front-ends or package sorting algorithms. I mean yes there will be outliers both ways, like a toxic environment which the candidate can hopefully spot during the talks, or your particular product can spark real passion in people (not likely). But speaking for myself I've never spotted a toxic environment (also never landed in one either) and for the few positions where I was really passionate about they didn't care about my passion. So your comment reads like a lot of theory, or ten-thousand-feet-view if you want, while the candidate reality is that the only stuff which really matters is how good you lie about alignment.

Kirby64

6 hours ago

Maybe I just haven't met these engineers, but isn't the problem usually "I don't want to relocate" ? Who talks about relocating as if that's the primary motivation for a job?

Aurornis

6 hours ago

You would be surprised. A large number of resumes for every job posted are from people outside of the area who want to move there for different reasons.

Most people want to have a job set up before they move to a new city.

Kirby64

6 hours ago

> Most people want to have a job set up before they move to a new city.

This is obvious for most people... generally a bad financial idea to move to a new city without a job. But, primarily taking a job just to move to a new city seems odd to me. I guess I just prioritize a job I want to work at over a city I live in.

Aurornis

6 hours ago

> I guess I just prioritize a job I want to work at over a city I live in.

Most people don't prioritize work over everything else. They move toward the life they want and try to find a job that supports it.

People move to be closer to friends and family or to be in a city they like more.

A lot of applicants requesting relocation were moving because their spouse got a job in the city and they had to move, too.

Kirby64

5 hours ago

I see it a little different. I'm not saying I prioritize work over everything else, I just see them as almost unrelated. The location is a filter, not a motivation. For various reasons, I wouldn't ever choose certain cities to live in and there's very few reasons a job would overcome that (I guess if you gave me enough money that would make me reconsider... but it's a pretty high bar that is likely unreasonable).

Meanwhile, if your spouse is moving for a job, it seems bizarre that a response on "why do you want to relocate" wouldn't just be some form of "my spouse got a job here, so I will be living here now".

soco

5 hours ago

> it seems bizarre that a response on "why do you want to relocate" wouldn't just be some form of "my spouse got a job here, so I will be living here now".

That's no real passion to work for us buddy, byez.

Kirby64

4 hours ago

Again I see this as unrelated. You can be passionate about the job, but the location is a checkbox.

Hippocrates

6 hours ago

This seems so obvious. It's like asking your manager for a raise and giving the justification that you want a bigger house.

Always be marketing what you can/will/have done for the company to bring value, not what the company can do for you.

bluGill

6 hours ago

This isn't good advice in this case. The company needs assurance you are worth the investment and that means they need to know this will be personally good for you.

pavel_lishin

6 hours ago

This feels like generically good advice when interviewing in general - show an interest in your potential future employer.

chris_j

5 hours ago

I take a different view. For a lot of candidates that I've interviewed in recent years, they made the decision to move to London, and _then_ decided to apply to us. Some of the best engineers that I've worked with have joined that way, and many of them stuck around for a long time. Of course the candidate should show an interest in the company. But frankly, if you're an employer in a place that people want to move to, that's something that you should be taking advantage of, not complaining when the candidate is honest about it.

lofaszvanitt

4 hours ago

HR people are like alien entities from another dimension. These borderline stupid and ridiculous ideas they disseminate and the framework of nonsense bullshit they force on proper experts is mind boggling.

It's like a snotty kid telling a grown adult to go, f themselves because they think that's funny.

thrill

7 hours ago

Sutton's Law.

josefritzishere

6 hours ago

This makes no sense. Even from a completely cynical corporate perspective, wouldn't these people's dependency on the employer for sponsorship be a plus, not a minus?

ransom1538

6 hours ago

If you are in tech, never move for a job immediately. Work there for 90 days before you even touch a UHaul form. I have been at companies where within 20 minutes I hated my coworkers (playing EDM on high all day in office). Just get a hotel at motel 6. If you are loving the job then the move is a less stressful and enjoyable.

atoav

7 hours ago

"I did not plan to relocate, but the opening at $your company made me reconsider. I then delved into $location history and culture, and found it really fascinating. Since I am [young|experienced in $oldcareer], I decided it would be worth trying out something new."